A midday screening of Lewis Milestone’s Rain (1932) heads up a double bill at the Bristol Aquarium cinema this Saturday, May 11. The event boasts an introduction by programmer James Harrison of Film Noir UK, and is followed by another classic Joan Crawford vehicle, Sudden Fear (1952.)

The first sound adaptation of the Broadway play (based on Somerset Maugham’s most famous short story), Rain was preceded by Sadie Thompson (1928), starring Gloria Swanson – who had swiped the film rights after seeing Jeanne Eagels onstage. Unlike Gloria’s rip-roaring star turn, Joan’s performance was harshly received, with Eagels’ death in 1929 arguably casting a pall over the entire project.

Nonetheless, in recent years Crawford’s tragic portrayal has been rightly reappraised, and Rain is now heralded as “a most important film in the history of the cinema, and one of the greatest films the Thirties produced.” Incidentally, the event’s description wrongly names John Huston as her leading man. While the future director also dabbled in acting, Reverend Davidson was actually played by his father, Walter Huston, to sinister effect.

This 4K restoration follows a 90th anniversary Blu-Ray released in 2022 by VCI Entertainment, with commentary tracks from Mick LaSalle and Richard Barrios – and as Jeffrey Kaufman notes here, Crawford’s Rain packed more of a pre-code punch than the 1953 remake, Miss Sadie Thompson.

Rain is, in essence, a modern morality play, with a supposedly ‘fallen’ woman (that would be Sadie, of course) interacting with a martinet missionary … This is a fascinating deconstruction of what most ‘upright’ people circa 1932 probably would have thought was the ‘normal order’ of things, namely a virtuous, Bible brandishing preacher being ‘right’, with a ‘working girl’ no doubt being ‘wrong’.

But despite the kind of snarky edge that Sadie has (especially with Crawford’s interpretation of the role), it’s not difficult to see where audience sympathies would have resided … The film still plays as a pretty tawdry melodrama, and it’s incredibly talky a lot of the time, but this new transfer highlights one of the film’s chief assets, the lustrous cinematography of Oliver T. Marsh. A claustrophobic atmosphere is definitely achieved, so that several characters’ desires to escape are completely understandable.

Later this month, a deeply flawed biopic of the original ‘Rain Girl’ will make its Blu-Ray debut as part of Film Focus: Kim Novak, a limited edition box-set from Australia’s Imprint Films, including audio commentary on selected scenes from Kim herself. Film critic Derek Winnert reviewed Jeanne Eagels in 2022.

Stand by for showbiz clichés by the dozen in this plush backstage biography … Producer and director George Sidney’s 1957 biographical film is loosely based on the life of the largely forgotten stage star Jeanne Eagels, omitting or fictionalising many aspects of Eagels’ real life … Jeff Chandler, Agnes Moorehead and Virginia Grey deliver involving performances, though Novak isn’t quite up to it, giving a performance that is insufficiently emotional and expressive, but then she has no help from the depressing, hollow-seeming, uninformative screenplay … But, if dramatically it does not all work too well, it is still a very handsome, quite interesting picture, shot in black and white by Robert Planck, with sets designed by Ross Bellah.

Also featured is Pal Joey, the 1957 musical teaming Novak with Frank Sinatra and Rita Hayworth. Best in show, however, is Middle of the Night (1959), a gritty romantic drama based on Paddy Chayevsky’s play, which gave Kim a chance to show her dramatic chops.